While the observation about the cold is fair, obesity is not "food in excess" the same way hunger is "missing food". We don't know the exact prime cause(s) of obesity, but the correlation between food availability and obesity is low.
In all but the <5% of occurrences where there is a hormonal imbalance or other medical issue, obesity is caused by eating too much food for your level of activity, full stop. Eating less and/or moving more will cause the vast, vast majority of obese people to lose weight. To say we don't know the cause of obesity is laughably wrong.
If you mean "food in excess" at the personal, not societal, level, it's a completely accurate statement.
> Eating less and/or moving more will cause the vast, vast majority of obese people to lose weight.
Sure, for a few months, and then they'll get back to their lifestyle and put the weight back. The real question of course is why so many people have started overeating since the 1980s, and that is definitely not explained by changes in food availability.
So sure, the proximate cause of obesity is chiar - eating more than you excersise - but the reason for this massive change in the behavior of the entire population is definitely not understood.
Going back to an old unhealthy lifestyle is largely irrelevant. The discussion here is what causes obesity. The answer, by and large, is eating too much food and doing too little exercise (either in quantity or strenuousness). So yes if you make a change, you'll lose weight, and if you change back, you'll gain the weight back. It's tautological.
No, that is the question you are trying to ask. But the real question is "why are so many people eating too much food now and/or doing too little exercise?". Somewhat related, why is losing weight long-term harder than kicking a heroin addiction?
Ending the question at "people eat too much food" is like finding out that since the last decade 30% of people have started falling and breaking their legs every year, and saying "people are clumsy and the concrete is hard, what's more to discuss?".
I mentioned above but I'll repeat it here as well. Humans conform to the norms around them. As weight went up and it became normalized there's no feeling of being alienated. Smoking is a good example. It went up. But then it became unpopular and declined.
Unfortunately, it's not acceptable to mention someone's weight. And the less that was allowed the more normalized it came be.
It's ok for Oprah and such to promote the idea of "love yourself." Unfortunately they failed to mention that some versions of yourself might be unhealthy.
And here we are, in the middle of a health pandemic and we are unable to discuss some of the root causes of worse outcomes.
> Humans conform to the norms around them. As weight went up and it became normalized there's no feeling of being alienated.
This fails to account for many properties of the obesity epidemic. I mentioned some elsewhere, but perhaps the most glaring flaw with your theory is that it doesn't explain why the epidemic began in the first place, and how it grew while it was still rare.
> Unfortunately, it's not acceptable to mention someone's weight. And the less that was allowed the more normalized it came be.
The actual reason it's not acceptable is because this angle has been studied, and it has been found to be actively harmful. Obese people don't become thinner by being told they are ugly, undesirable, about to die, lacking in willpower, or that they should eat more salad. If anything, this can lead to feelings of depression and more weight gain.
> And here we are, in the middle of a health pandemic and we are unable to discuss some of the root causes of worse outcomes.
This is true and it is a shame, but arguments like yours are exactly the reason. Instead of digging deeper and asking why are people overeating in the first place, 99% of discussions on obesity focus on lifestyle changes (the right diet, how to exercise more, lamenting modern trends etc). We're basically treating obesity mostly like we used to treat mental disorders (and still do to a great extent), and refusing to even try to look for environmental or other factors, that are much more likely for such a tectonic shift in the prevalence of obesity.
It's again important to remember that people didn't start getting obese with the advent of industrialization (1850s) or even modern automation (1940s-50s), but much later. Obesity was stable for thousands of years before 1980, and then it went from 1-3% to 30%. And this is not happening only in rich countries, it is happening in poor countries that work in the global economy. And it is not uniform in the populations of these countries, but geographically clustered and professionally clustered as well.
Looking at NIMH data[0], about 7.1% of US adults are diagnosed with depression, and about half of those diagnosed receive medical treatment - so at least 3.5% of the population is receiving medically prescribed treatments that are known to cause weight issues from depression alone. Adding other mental illnesses, endocrine disorders, and drug abuse, I would bet that at least 10% of the population is receiving drugs that are known to affect weight regulation mechanisms.
Still, this is a far cry from the >30% experiencing obesity, especially since not all psychoactive drugs alter body weight, and only a percentage of people taking those drugs that do will experience weight changes.
We know that more calories in than calories burned leads to weight gain.
We know that the body + mind has nutritional requirements. If those are not met the body + mind will ccontinue to pursue those requirements. That is "empty calories" have a cost associated with them.
We know that (urban) food deserts impact consumption of (quality) foods and inturn health.
We know that humans conform to the norms they see around them. That is, "normalize" a condition and humans will adjust. Smoking is a good example. So is obesity.
We know that epigenetics is a thing, and that what you consume has impact, in some cases on future generations.
Obesity is a relatively new First World Problem. The idea that there's been some mass change in DNA just isn't reasonable compared to the obvious (too many calories vs not enough exercise). Oprah lied.
> We know that the body + mind has nutritional requirements. If those are not met the body + mind will ccontinue to pursue those requirements. That is "empty calories" have a cost associated with them.
While this is likely true, it is not a well defined theory at the moment, it is handwavy speculation. It especially doesn't explain why this started happening in the 1980s - empty calories and deserts existed in plentiful quantities for at least a hundred years before that, with approximately 0 obesity relatively speaking.
It also doesn't explain other patterns of obesity that we see today. Particularly, that obesity prevalence tends to decrease with altitude, that it varies by profession, and that it varies by country despite wealth (e.g. Japan is one of the richest but also least obese countries in the world).
> We know that epigenetics is a thing, and that what you consume has impact, in some cases on future generations.
Again, we know this in a handwavy sense, not in a quantifiable sense.
> Obesity is a relatively new First World Problem. The idea that there's been some mass change in DNA just isn't reasonable compared to the obvious (too many calories vs not enough exercise). Oprah lied.
It's not a First World Problem, it's a problem even in extremely poor countries. And yes, genetic causes are not in any way likely - not sure who is claiming that.
My money is on environmental causes, some contaminant that we're not aware of at the moment, either in food or in something else.
One interesting candidate is lithium, which is known to produce weight gain in therapeutic doses (it is a common psychiatric medication), and is known to be present in small doses as a contaminant in drinking water. Lithium mining became widespread sometime around the 1980s, so the time-line is possible.
